It Could Have Been Worse

Cherubim. Credit: Grok AI

You do not need to be a security expert to know that things could have been much worse on Oct.7. It’s an open secret in Israel. But it is not a secret that anyone wants to talk about. This reticence has nothing to do with the inquiry commissions or lack of them. This knowledge lay on the root level of Israeli consciousness, where it is bullshit-proof and spin-proof, and as is so much the way in Israel, there are two schools of thought regarding this knowledge. The school of thought that I champion says that only Divine intervention can explain the failure of our enemies to do such damage as to put the future of Israel in question. This school of thought remains with the unanswered question of the necessity of the damage that was done, and the role of Divine Provenance in that. The other school of thought, the secular one, is faced with the stark reality that it was the enemy who decided what would be the extent of the damage done to Israel, and that there was nothing to prevent them from causing catastrophic harm, except their own missteps. This realization is causing both schools of thought enormous stress considering the other bit of root-level knowledge in the Israeli psyche: that there is little chance that there will be a serious, impartial investigation of the security failure, and that there is little chance that blame will be apportioned to those guilty of criminal negligence, and worst of all, as a result of these first two, lessons will not be learned.

For illustration, here is a sample scenario that falls well into the realm of the possible.

1. No initial rocket barrage by either Hamas in the south or Hezbollah in the north. A quick and efficient silencing and blinding of the border security, with conquest of the border command bases (this was done successfully in the south by Hamas). No leaked information, no Go-Pro uploads. Just silence, allowing the confusion on the Israeli side to paralyze Israeli forces.

2. Ten teams of ten “technicals” (four-wheel drive Toyotas with anti-aircraft guns mounted on the back), manned by eight terrorists armed with, in addition to the main gun, thirty to forty RPG’s, ten to twenty demolition charges and enough ammunition for their assault rifles for a half-day of mayhem, set out for each of the five main Israeli air bases, twenty assault vehicles per base. There would be no stops on the way, in an effort to reach the bases before they could be locked down.

3. The golden chalice would be if a team managed to enter one of the underground bunkers storing Israeli aircraft. One bullet from an assault rifle can disable a fighter aircraft. Because of the expense of these aircraft, we must assume that security protocols are in place that would lead to a sealing of the bunkers at first warning. In this case the teams would destroy as much infrastructure as possible with an emphasis on runways and access roads to the runways. An aircraft without a usable runway is useless. The assault teams, or secondary teams that accompany them for this specific purpose, would take as many soldiers as hostages as possible and race back to the tunnels in Gaza and Lebanon.

4. Massive rocket barrage. From Gaza and Lebanon targeting the civilian areas of cities for peak terrorist impact, and essential industries such as power plants and water purification sites. Iran dedicates one hundred ballistic missiles to each Israeli air base. Israel’s Iron Dome and Arrow missile defense systems are overwhelmed. The Israeli air force is out of the fight.

5. After two hours of bombardment comes the second attack wave. Twenty thousand highly trained terrorists from Hamas in the south and thirty thousand Hezbollah terrorists from the north attack major Israeli population centers while destroying everything in their path. A few thousand of these terrorists are designated “Shahids,” or suicide bombers who are sent either on foot or by light aircraft or by land vehicle, to disrupt any attempt by Israel to organize resistance. These terrorists carry extra arms for any Israeli Arabs who would choose to join the “strong horse.” The Arabs of Judea and Samaria swarm down into Israeli population centers to join the terrorists of Hamas and Hezbollah.

6. Israeli reservists are called up but cannot get to their units. Many refuse to leave their families unprotected. The regular army begins a long, slow process of re-taking population centers, but they are evenly matched by the trained terrorists. There is heavy fighting all over Israel, amongst the civilian population.

7. Tens of thousands of Israeli Jews are murdered, scenes of the Gaza border settlements multiplied exponentially. Live streaming by thousands of terrorists ignites the imaginations of the Arabs of surrounding countries. Hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jews are taken hostage in situ, while tens of thousands of Israeli Jews are pulled into the tunnels of Gaza and Lebanon, joining the Israeli soldiers already there.

That’s enough to get the idea of the result of a single day. This could have happened. All the pieces on the Arab side were in place. A lack of coordination between Arab forces prevented a nightmare scenario for Israel. What did happen was bad enough, but it is important to make clear that things could have been much worse.

The hidden blessing here is that this root knowledge is common to all Israelis, who have been notoriously divided politically and culturally since the Likud rose to power in 1977. There have been times when Israelis pulled together temporarily during different crisis that arose since then and formed “unity governments,” that allowed Israel to present a united front against external enemies or allowed the government to take drastic measures to save the economy. Once the crisis passed, these governments fell apart and the sides ran back to their ideological caves. Now, even though on the face of it we have again retreated to our ideologies, we all have that resigned look on our faces that there is serious work to be done on our national teeth, and that it cannot be put off. That one last root canal that has defied all attempts to clean it. Our best dentists have scraped and filed that hole to death, each time claiming victory even while resealing that one untouched off-center root.

It is this open secret of willful neglect haphazardly plastered over that is what feeds the decay itself, and is what gives it agency over the Jewish people. Exposure to light will be the harbinger of the cleansing of the collective Jewish psyche. We have a gathering spot. It is not at the demonstrations on Kaplan Street. It is not in a settlement in Samaria. It is not on the Temple Mount. It is not in the halls of the Israeli Supreme Court. It is facing the decay. That is our gathering spot. The future true and legitimate leaders of the Jewish people must gather, long before their political selves, long before their religious and ideological selves, and meet, and agree together to do the hard work that needs to be done. And that is to peel back the stop-gap layers of self-deception and look upon the decayed source-root truth and expose the source of our deepest shame: that we are vulnerable. We are vulnerable because we are a house divided. The Jews of Israel and the Diaspora are vulnerable. This is a hard statement for a Zionist to make, but it is no less true for that.

Who will be at the gathering? None of the present-day security experts or ex-generals, none of the present-day politicians, and none of the faceless bureaucrats pulling the levers and pushing the buttons. No-one over the age of fifty, the cut-off age above which all culpability lays. The governments of the next ten years should concern themselves with a holding action, until the present culpable generation of leadership can be eased out to pasture and the new leadership can develop and grow into the responsibility that it must seize. We, the culpable generation, can only pass on our plea, our prayer, for wisdom for the new generation. We cannot pass on how to communicate because that has been impossible for us for too long now. They do not need that from us anyway, as they have learned the hard way to communicate, in the trenches. Left and right, liberal and messianic, gay and straight, they communicated because they had to communicate to prevail. That is the root knowledge of the new generation: that first comes the shared word. Nothing can touch that. Nothing can weaken that. This convergence of Jewish souls will create a strong epoxy that will give us the strength to acknowledge that what we have concealed is what stains us, and that this cleansing will be what sustains us.

How so? We have stained our fellow Jew in the service of the Jew hater. We thought we were fighting each other, and this fighting was amplified from without by the Jew hater, encouraged and supported with funding and applause. Our worst habit has been, upon discovering leakage from our stockpile of bile, to scoop up handfuls and fling it upon our ideological opponents like jailed primates throwing feces at visitors to the zoo. The Jews have a knack for blaming other Jews for the problems of the Jews. “You are filth” we say to each other, marking each other, as if to identify proper targets for our own ire, and for the ire of the Jew haters. In our haughtiness, we weaken ourselves. We must reach up with a cleansing hand to clear the foreign stain that we now realize, with great clarity, has no place in our home. The true and legitimate leaders of the Jewish people will soon stand together, ideological opponents still true to their beliefs and declare:

“Not like this!”

Still opponents, fierce even, the Jew must reach out with a warm moist towel and clean the face of the Jew standing across the aisle, that once hated face, that face that must now be loved. That face that our generation dirtied, and to our great shame, the face that another, better generation must now clean. Face to face we must stand, like modern Cherubim, in the Holy of Holies that is this gift of the Land of Israel.